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| Apple jelly is delicious on toast |
In the golden olden days, children showed their appreciation for their teacher by bringing them a delicious apple. While this may have garnered favour from the teacher, it could also turn jealous classmates against the thoughtful gift giver and the label “apple polisher” emerged. A rotten apple is a threat to the bunch and is also a metaphorical warning; let it stay amongst its fruity friends and it will destroy the rest of them, making them inedible or in the case of humans, making them just as potentially rotten. Next up in my mental queue of apple references is judging a tree by its fruit. Trees are cut down when disease is detected: who wants to munch on a trees decaying produce? The bold statement here is you are some kind of fruit dear reader, and you will be judged by what you “produce”. Lastly, and without exhausting the fruit and tree metaphors because I am confident you may be thinking of many more, there is this: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. This is the one that I must land on with a cringe. When fully ripened, trees let go of their fruit. The fruit, say an apple, is far more appealing when it is plucked from a branch, rather than from the ground, where perhaps decaying has begun. Apples fall from apple trees, coconuts from on high palm trees and cucumbers from cucumber trees (just checking to see if you still here with me dear reader, because I promise I will make a point soon). We never expect bananas from a peach tree, or monkeys from a human mother, (despite the ridiculousness of the suggestion that we evolved from primates). You get the point. The cringing part is the fallen fruit, the already turning into insect food rotting that the earth inevitably engages itself in… the reabsorption:
Here I will go for the jugular vein pulsating with life blood on either side of your neck: You are an apple and you came from a tree. You are the product of parents, and ancestral roots are partially visible to the naked eye, that being those relatives still alive or recently departed. Then their are the deeper roots, buried beneath the surface, say your great great great grandmama on your paternal and maternal sides of the family. But for them, you would not be, so to speak. Their life blood flows in you, and you can feel the pulse when you hold your hands to your carotid arteries. They are you and you are them and this may be the grandest truth ever told or it may be the most vile thing to be observed and uttered because the tree and its fruit are identifiable, undeniable, impossible to separate. You are produce dear one. You came from someone, many someones that came before you. The tree you grew from may be the healthiest one in the orchard and the fruit it has borne, the most delicious and sumptuous, or rot, I mean not…
